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John Mather's seminal works in Hamiltonian dynamics represent some of the most important contributions to our understanding of the complex balance between stable and unstable motions in classical mechanics. His novel approach—known as Aubry–Mather theory—singles out the existence of special orbits and invariant measures of the system, which possess a very rich dynamical and geometric structure. In particular, the associated invariant sets play a leading role in determining the global dynamics of the system. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to Mather's theory, and can serve as an interdisciplinary bridge for researchers and students from different fields seeking to acquaint themselves with the topic. Starting with the mathematical background from which Mather's theory was born, the book first focuses on the core questions the theory aims to answer—notably the destiny of broken invariant KAM tori and the onset of chaos—and describes how it can be viewed as a natural counterpart of KAM theory. The book achieves this by guiding readers through a detailed illustrative example, which also provides the basis for introducing the main ideas and concepts of the general theory. It then describes the whole theory and its subsequent developments and applications in their full generality.

Princeton University's Elias Stein was the first mathematician to see the profound interconnections that tie classical Fourier analysis to several complex variables and representation theory. His fundamental contributions include the Kunze–Stein phenomenon, the construction of new representations, the Stein interpolation theorem, the idea of a restriction theorem for the Fourier transform, and the theory of Hp Spaces in several variables. Through his great discoveries, through books that have set the highest standard for mathematical exposition, and through his influence on his many collaborators and students, Stein has changed mathematics. Drawing inspiration from Stein's contributions to harmonic analysis and related topics, this book gathers papers from internationally renowned mathematicians, many of whom have been Stein's students. The book also includes expository papers on Stein's work and its influence.

This book introduces a new theoretical entity: Agent_Zero. This software individual, or “agent,” is endowed with distinct emotional/affective, cognitive/deliberative, and social modules. Grounded in contemporary neuroscience, these internal components interact to generate observed, often far-from-rational, individual behavior. When multiple agents of this new type move and interact spatially, they collectively generate an astonishing range of dynamics spanning the fields of social conflict, psychology, public health, law, network science, and economics. The book weaves a computational tapestry with threads from Plato, David Hume, Charles Darwin, Ivan Pavlov, Adam Smith, Leo Tolstoy, Karl Marx, William James, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, among others. This transformative synthesis of social philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and agent-based modeling will fascinate scholars and students of every stripe. Computer programs are provided in the book or available online. This book is a signal departure in what it includes (e.g., a new synthesis of neurally grounded internal modules), what it eschews (e.g., standard behavioral imitation), the phenomena it generates (from genocide to financial panic), and the modeling arsenal it offers the scientific community. For generative social science, this book presents a ground-breaking vision and the tools to realize it.

This book develops and applies a theory of the ambient metric in conformal geometry. This is a Lorentz metric in n+2 dimensions that encodes a conformal class of metrics in n dimensions. The ambient metric has an alternate incarnation as the Poincaré metric, a metric in n+1 dimensions having the conformal manifold as its conformal infinity. In this realization, the construction has played a central role in the AdS/CFT correspondence in physics. The existence and uniqueness of the ambient metric at the formal power series level is treated in detail. This includes the derivation of the ambient obstruction tensor and an explicit analysis of the special cases of conformally flat and conformally Einstein spaces. Poincaré metrics are introduced and shown to be equivalent to the ambient formulation. Self-dual Poincaré metrics in four dimensions are considered as a special case, leading to a formal power series proof of LeBrun's collar neighborhood theorem proved originally using twistor methods. Conformal curvature tensors are introduced and their fundamental properties are established. A jet isomorphism theorem is established for conformal geometry, resulting in a representation of the space of jets of conformal structures at a point in terms of conformal curvature tensors. The book concludes with a construction and characterization of scalar conformal invariants in terms of ambient curvature, applying results in parabolic invariant theory.

This book presents highlights of recent work in arithmetic algebraic geometry by some of the world's leading mathematicians. Together, these 2016 lectures—which were delivered in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the annual summer workshops in Alpbach, Austria—provide an introduction to high-level research on three topics: Shimura varieties, hyperelliptic continued fractions and generalized Jacobians, and Faltings heights and L-functions. The book consists of notes, written by young researchers, on three sets of lectures or minicourses given at Alpbach. The first course contains recent results dealing with the local Langlands conjecture. The fundamental question is whether for a given datum there exists a so-called local Shimura variety. In some cases, they exist in the category of rigid analytic spaces; in others, one has to use Scholze's perfectoid spaces. The second course addresses the famous Pell equation—not in the classical setting but rather with the so-called polynomial Pell equation, where the integers are replaced by polynomials in one variable with complex coefficients, which leads to the study of hyperelliptic continued fractions and generalized Jacobians. The third course originates in the Chowla–Selberg formula and relates values of the L-function for elliptic curves with the height of Heegner points on the curves. It proves the Gross–Zagier formula on Shimura curves and verifies the Colmez conjecture on average.

By studying the degeneration of abelian varieties with PEL structures, this book explains the compactifications of smooth integral models of all PEL-type Shimura varieties, providing the logical foundation for several exciting recent developments. PEL-type Shimura varieties, which are natural generalizations of modular curves, are useful for studying the arithmetic properties of automorphic forms and automorphic representations, and they have played important roles in the development of the Langlands program. As with modular curves, it is desirable to have integral models of compactifications of PEL-type Shimura varieties that can be described in sufficient detail near the boundary, which this book explains in detail. Through the discussion, the book generalizes the theory of degenerations of polarized abelian varieties and the application of that theory to the construction of toroidal and minimal compactifications of Siegel moduli schemes over the integers (as developed by Mumford, Faltings, and Chai). The book is designed to be accessible to graduate students who have an understanding of schemes and abelian varieties.

Asymptotic differential algebra seeks to understand the solutions of differential equations and their asymptotics from an algebraic point of view. The differential field of transseries plays a central role in the subject. Besides powers of the variable, these series may contain exponential and logarithmic terms. Over the last thirty years, transseries emerged variously as super-exact asymptotic expansions of return maps of analytic vector fields, in connection with Tarski's problem on the field of reals with exponentiation, and in mathematical physics. Their formal nature also makes them suitable for machine computations in computer algebra systems. This book validates the intuition that the differential field of transseries is a universal domain for asymptotic differential algebra. It does so by establishing in the realm of transseries a complete elimination theory for systems of algebraic differential equations with asymptotic side conditions. Beginning with background chapters on valuations and differential algebra, the book goes on to develop the basic theory of valued differential fields, including a notion of differential-henselianity. Next, H-fields are singled out among ordered valued differential fields to provide an algebraic setting for the common properties of Hardy fields and the differential field of transseries. The study of their extensions culminates in an analogue of the algebraic closure of a field: the Newton–Liouville closure of an H-field. This paves the way to a quantifier elimination with interesting consequences.

Benford's law states that the leading digits of many data sets are not uniformly distributed from one through nine, but rather exhibit a profound bias. This bias is evident in everything from electricity bills and street addresses to stock prices, population numbers, mortality rates, and the lengths of rivers. This book demonstrates the many useful techniques that arise from the law, showing how truly multidisciplinary it is, and encouraging collaboration. Beginning with the general theory, the chapters explain the prevalence of the bias, highlighting explanations for when systems should and should not follow Benford's law and how quickly such behavior sets in. The book goes on to discuss important applications in disciplines ranging from accounting and economics to psychology and the natural sciences. The book describes how Benford's law has been successfully used to expose fraud in elections, medical tests, tax filings, and financial reports. Additionally, numerous problems, background materials, and technical details are available online to help instructors create courses around the book. Emphasizing common challenges and techniques across the disciplines, this book shows how Benford's law can serve as a productive meeting ground for researchers and practitioners in diverse fields.

This book provides an introduction to algebraic cycles on complex algebraic varieties, to the major conjectures relating them to cohomology, and even more precisely to Hodge structures on cohomology. The book is intended for both students and researchers, and not only presents a survey of the geometric methods developed in the last thirty years to understand the famous Bloch-Beilinson conjectures, but also examines recent work by the author. It focuses on two central objects: the diagonal of a variety—and the partial Bloch-Srinivas type decompositions it may have depending on the size of Chow groups—as well as its small diagonal, which is the right object to consider in order to understand the ring structure on Chow groups and cohomology. An exploration of a sampling of recent works by the author looks at the relation, conjectured in general by Bloch and Beilinson, between the coniveau of general complete intersections and their Chow groups and a very particular property satisfied by the Chow ring of K3 surfaces and conjecturally by hyper-Kähler manifolds. In particular, the book delves into arguments originating in Nori's work that have been further developed by others.

This book brings together important thinkers in mathematics, history, and philosophy to explore the relationship between mathematics and narrative. “Circles disturbed” reflect the last words of Archimedes before he was slain by a Roman soldier—“Don't disturb my circles”—words that seem to refer to two radically different concerns: that of the practical person living in the concrete world of reality, and that of the theoretician lost in a world of abstraction. Stories and theorems are, in a sense, the natural languages of these two worlds—stories representing the way we act and interact, and theorems giving us pure thought, distilled from the hustle and bustle of reality. Yet, though the voices of stories and theorems seem totally different, they share profound connections and similarities. This book delves into topics such as the way in which historical and biographical narratives shape our understanding of mathematics and mathematicians, the development of “myths of origins” in mathematics, the structure and importance of mathematical dreams, the role of storytelling in the formation of mathematical intuitions, the ways mathematics helps us organize the way we think about narrative structure, and much more.

This book goes further than the exploration of the general structure of pseudo-reductive groups to study the classification over an arbitrary field. An Isomorphism Theorem proved here determines the automorphism schemes of these groups. The book also gives a Tits-Witt type classification of isotropic groups and displays a cohomological obstruction to the existence of pseudo-split forms. Constructions based on regular degenerate quadratic forms and new techniques with central extensions provide insight into new phenomena in characteristic 2, which also leads to simplifications of the earlier work. A generalized standard construction is shown to account for all possibilities up to mild central extensions. The results and methods developed in this book will interest mathematicians and graduate students who work with algebraic groups in number theory and algebraic geometry in positive characteristic.

This book introduces the theory of complex surfaces through a comprehensive look at finite covers of the projective plane branched along line arrangements. It emphasizes those finite coverings that are free quotients of the complex 2-ball. The book also includes a background on the classical Gauss hypergeometric function of one variable, and a chapter on the Appell two-variable F1 hypergeometric function. The book began as a set of lecture notes, taken by the author, of a course given by Friedrich Hirzebruch at ETH Zürich in 1996. The lecture notes were then considerably expanded over a number of years. In this book, the author has expanded those notes even further, still stressing examples offered by finite covers of line arrangements. The book is largely self-contained and foundational material is introduced and explained as needed, but not treated in full detail. References to omitted material are provided for interested readers. Aimed at graduate students and researchers, this is an accessible account of a highly informative area of complex geometry.

Modular forms are tremendously important in various areas of mathematics, from number theory and algebraic geometry to combinatorics and lattices. Their Fourier coefficients, with Ramanujan's tau-function as a typical example, have deep arithmetic significance. Prior to this book, the fastest known algorithms for computing these Fourier coefficients took exponential time, except in some special cases. This book gives an algorithm for computing coefficients of modular forms of level one in polynomial time. For example, Ramanujan's tau of a prime number p can be computed in time bounded by a fixed power of the logarithm of p. Such fast computation of Fourier coefficients is itself based on the main result of the book: the computation, in polynomial time, of Galois representations over finite fields attached to modular forms by the Langlands program. Because these Galois representations typically have a nonsolvable image, this result is a major step forward from explicit class field theory, and it could be described as the start of the explicit Langlands program. The book begins with a concise and concrete introduction that makes it accessible to readers without an extensive background in arithmetic geometry, and it includes a chapter that describes actual computations.

This book explores an important aspect of number theory—the theory of exponential sums over finite fields and their Mellin transforms—from a new, categorical point of view. The book presents fundamentally important results and a plethora of examples, opening up new directions in the subject. The finite-field Mellin transform (of a function on the multiplicative group of a finite field) is defined by summing that function against variable multiplicative characters. The basic question considered in the book is how the values of the Mellin transform are distributed (in a probabilistic sense), in cases where the input function is suitably algebro-geometric. This question is answered by the book's main theorem, using a mixture of geometric, categorical, and group-theoretic methods. By providing a new framework for studying Mellin transforms over finite fields, this book opens up a new way for researchers to further explore the subject.

This book addresses a basic question in differential geometry that was first considered by physicists Stanley Deser and Adam Schwimmer in 1993 in their study of conformal anomalies. The question concerns conformally invariant functionals on the space of Riemannian metrics over a given manifold. These functionals act on a metric by first constructing a Riemannian scalar out of it, and then integrating this scalar over the manifold. Suppose this integral remains invariant under conformal re-scalings of the underlying metric. What information can one then deduce about the Riemannian scalar? This book asserts that the Riemannian scalar must be a linear combination of three obvious candidates, each of which clearly satisfies the required property: a local conformal invariant, a divergence of a Riemannian vector field, and the Chern–Gauss–Bonnet integrand. The book provides a proof of this conjecture. The result itself sheds light on the algebraic structure of conformal anomalies, which appear in many settings in theoretical physics. It also clarifies the geometric significance of the renormalized volume of asymptotically hyperbolic Einstein manifolds. The methods introduced here make an interesting connection between algebraic properties of local invariants—such as the classical Riemannian invariants and the more recently studied conformal invariants—and the study of global invariants, in this case conformally invariant integrals.

This book provides the mathematical foundations for the analysis of a class of degenerate elliptic operators defined on manifolds with corners, which arise in a variety of applications such as population genetics, mathematical finance, and economics. The results discussed in this book prove the uniqueness of the solution to the martingale problem and therefore the existence of the associated Markov process. The book uses an “integral kernel method” to develop mathematical foundations for the study of such degenerate elliptic operators and the stochastic processes they define. The precise nature of the degeneracies of the principal symbol for these operators leads to solutions of the parabolic and elliptic problems that display novel regularity properties. Dually, the adjoint operator allows for rather dramatic singularities, such as measures supported on high codimensional strata of the boundary. The book establishes the uniqueness, existence, and sharp regularity properties for solutions to the homogeneous and inhomogeneous heat equations, as well as a complete analysis of the resolvent operator acting on Hölder spaces. It shows that the semigroups defined by these operators have holomorphic extensions to the right half plane. The book also demonstrates precise asymptotic results for the long-time behavior of solutions to both the forward and backward Kolmogorov equations.

This book begins with the resolution of a major open question about the local structure of Bruhat-Tits buildings. It then puts forward an algebraic solution into a geometric context by developing a general fixed point theory for groups acting on buildings of arbitrary type, giving necessary and sufficient conditions for the residues fixed by a group to form a kind of subbuilding or “form” of the original building. At the center of this theory is the notion of a Tits index, a combinatorial version of the notion of an index in the relative theory of algebraic groups. These results are combined at the end to show that every exceptional Bruhat-Tits building arises as a form of a “residually pseudo-split” building. The book concludes with a display of the Tits indices associated with each of these exceptional forms. This is the third and final volume of a trilogy that began with The Structure of Spherical Buildings and The Structure of Affine Buildings.

This book studies the cohomology of locally symmetric spaces for GL(N) where the cohomology groups are with coefficients in a local system attached to a finite-dimensional algebraic representation of GL(N). The image of the global cohomology in the cohomology of the Borel–Serre boundary is called Eisenstein cohomology, since at a transcendental level the cohomology classes may be described in terms of Eisenstein series and induced representations. However, because the groups are sheaf-theoretically defined, one can control their rationality and even integrality properties. A celebrated theorem by Langlands describes the constant term of an Eisenstein series in terms of automorphic L-functions. A cohomological interpretation of this theorem in terms of maps in Eisenstein cohomology allows the authors to study the rationality properties of the special values of Rankin–Selberg L-functions for GL(n) × GL(m), where n + m = N. The book carries through the entire program with an eye toward generalizations. The book should be of interest to advanced graduate students and researchers interested in number theory, automorphic forms, representation theory, and the cohomology of arithmetic groups.

While all of us regularly use basic mathematical symbols such as those for plus, minus, and equals, few of us know that many of these symbols weren't available before the sixteenth century. What did mathematicians rely on for their work before then? And how did mathematical notations evolve into what we know today? This book explains the fascinating history behind the development of our mathematical notation system. It shows how symbols were used initially, how one symbol replaced another over time, and how written math was conveyed before and after symbols became widely adopted. Traversing mathematical history and the foundations of numerals in different cultures, the book looks at how historians have disagreed over the origins of the number system for the past two centuries. It follows the transfigurations of algebra from a rhetorical style to a symbolic one, demonstrating that most algebra before the sixteenth century was written in prose or in verse employing the written names of numerals. It also investigates the subconscious and psychological effects that mathematical symbols have had on mathematical thought, moods, meaning, communication, and comprehension. It considers how these symbols influence us (through similarity, association, identity, resemblance, and repeated imagery), how they lead to new ideas by subconscious associations, how they make connections between experience and the unknown, and how they contribute to the communication of basic mathematics. From words to abbreviations to symbols, this book shows how math evolved to the familiar forms we use today.

Graph theory goes back several centuries and revolves around the study of graphs—mathematical structures showing relations between objects. With applications in biology, computer science, transportation science, and other areas, graph theory encompasses some of the most beautiful formulas in mathematics—and some of its most famous problems. This book explores the questions and puzzles that have been studied, and often solved, through graph theory. It looks at graph theory's development and the vibrant individuals responsible for the field's growth. Introducing fundamental concepts, the book explores a diverse plethora of classic problems such as the Lights Out Puzzle, and each chapter contains math exercises for readers to savor. An eye-opening journey into the world of graphs, the book offers exciting problem-solving possibilities for mathematics and beyond.